Catholic Church « Jeff Peel's Diary

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Warsi, Paterson and the “Holy See” – pushing against the tide

Published February 16, 2012 Opinion Leave a Comment
Tags: Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Catholic Church, Christianity, Family planning, Holy See, Islam, Owen Paterson, Western world

Paterson meets the pope. Is that a good thing?

Earlier in the week the “Secretary for the Holy See’s Relations with States”, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, hosted talks between the “Holy See” and a British Government Ministerial delegation led by Baroness Warsi. The delegation also included the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Owen Paterson.

A joint communique was issued at the end of the meeting.

It included the following statement:

Too many people are still hungry, too many people do not have access to education and to decent work, too many women die in childbirth. In view of these challenges we recognise a shared obligation to achieve a fair international financial and trade framework. And we will strive for a better future for all humanity, taking into particular account care for the poorest people in the world.

Indeed. However, in most cases the reason that too many people are too hungry, and that too many do not have access to education or paid work, is because of over-population and lack of birth control – and the institutionalised degradation of women. The Holy See’s failure to encourage the use of contraception and family planning – and abject failure to promote equality and equal status for women in some of the world’s poorest societies – has manifestly contributed to the very problems to which the joint communique alludes.

Baronness Warsi – a Muslim – was at pains to point out that “Christianity is as vital to our future as it is to our past”. Thankfully that’s not the case. Only a minority of people in the UK attend any type of church regularly. The United Kingdom is rapidly dispensing with religion. And, as for the Holy See, it’s an institution in crisis. It has failed to adequately address the issue of clerical abuse at its heart. The majority of its church members in the West ignore most of its core teachings. It has become the ultimate menu religion. Moreover, it doesn’t even represent Christianity – Christianity has splintered off in a myriad of directions, and has no unified voice on just about any social issue. Moreover, Islam is side-lining the Catholic Church in importance – it is by far the world’s fastest growing religion. In the period 1990-2000, approximately 12.5 million more people converted to Islam than to Christianity.

The British government needs to be much more cognisant of the growing public indifference to religion in the UK – and the inevitable marginalisation of all religions in secular Western societies. The Cabinet Office is pushing against the tide – and Baronness Warsi is alienating even her own cabinet colleagues (with the obvious exception of Owen Paterson) in taking part in these pointless and counter-intuitive delegations to failing, anachronistic, sexist dynasties.

More useful than the joint statement from Her Majesty’s Cabinet Office and The Holy See, is the following extract from the Science Summit on World Population – issued in 1993, and still as relevant today.

Millions of people still do not have adequate access to family planning services and suitable contraceptives. Only about one-half of married women of reproductive age are currently practicing contraception. Yet as the director-general of UNICEF put it, ”Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human race.” Existing contraceptive methods could go far toward alleviating the unmet need if they were available and used in sufficient numbers, through a variety of channels and distribution, sensitively adapted to local needs.

But most contraceptives are for use by women, who consequently bear the risks to health. The development of contraceptives for male use continues to lag. Better contraceptives are needed for both men and women, but developing new contraceptive approaches is slow and financially unattractive to industry. Further work is needed on an ideal spectrum of contraceptive methods that are safe, efficacious, easy to use and deliver, reasonably priced, user-controlled and responsive, appropriate for special populations and age cohorts, reversible, and at least some of which protect against sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS.

Reducing fertility rates, however, cannot be achieved merely by providing more contraceptives. The demand for these services has to be addressed. Even when family planning and other reproductive health services are widely available, the social and economic status of women affects individual decisions to use them. The ability of women to make decisions about family size is greatly affected by gender roles within society and in sexual relationships. Ensuring equal opportunity for women in all aspects of society is crucial.

Thus all reproductive health services must be implemented as a part of broader strategies to raise the quality of human life. They must include the following:

Efforts to reduce and eliminate gender-based inequalities. Women and men should have equal opportunities and responsibilities in sexual, social, and economic life.

Provision of convenient family planning and other reproductive health services with a wide variety of safe contraceptive options. irrespective of an individual’s ability to pay.

Encouragement of voluntary approaches to family planning and elimination of unsafe and coercive practices.

Development policies that address basic needs such as clean water, sanitation, broad primary health care measures and education; and that foster empowerment of the poor and women.

“The adoption of a smaller family norm, with consequent decline in total fertility, should not be viewed only in demographic terms. It means that people, and particularly women, are empowered and are taking control of their fertility and the planning of their lives; it means that children are born by choice, not by chance, and that births are better planned; and it means that families are able to invest relatively more in a smaller number of beloved children, trying to prepare them for a better future.”

Sheer Infuriating Hypocrisy

Published October 18, 2010 Opinion 13 Comments
Tags: Catholic Church, Catholic school, Democratic Unionist Party, Education, Faith school, Northern Ireland, Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson at the Evolve Public Policy Forum

Image by DUP Photos via Flickr

It has taken me a full day to temper the invective I was planning to use in response to Peter Robinson’s contribution to the education debate. To those of you who wanted me to welcome the DUP leader’s new-found fondness for secular education – you’re about to be disappointed.

This man has been involved in one of the most divisive forces in Northern Ireland politics. The DUP has systematically propped-up the malevolent cultural apartheid that corrupts every corner of our civil society. But now he wants a single state education system. This man runs a political party and front bench team that wants creationist garbage taught in our schools and “intelligent design theory” featured in our museums. His party’s flat-earth perspectives and reactionary dogma is the utter antithesis of all that is right-minded and free-thinking. He fronts a rag-bag collection of bigots and political fossils that have helped put Northern Ireland on the international laughing stock map of small-minded mini nations.

His motivation for having a single state-funded education system, with funding removed for state schools, runs counter to logic and decency. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no advocate of Irish medium schools – I don’t believe that state funding should have been extended to such schools. They are patently absurd. However many schools that he describes as church schools attain some of the highest standards of academic excellence not just in Northern Ireland – but also in the United Kingdom. To remove state funding from some of our finest schools would be a public scandal.

Few, if any, of our finest church schools are “faith schools” in a pejorative sense. None is permitted to discriminate on the grounds of religious faith when employing staff. All adhere to state recommended curricula. Most teach children good standards of citizenship and mutual respect.

As an Atheist I choose to send one of my my children to a Quaker school – a school that makes clear that it accepts children of parents of faith and those (like me and my wife) who have no faith. It also happens to be a school that attains incredibly high academic standards. It certainly does not force religious doctrine or liturgy on its pupils. In all respects it adheres to the academic guidelines defined by the Accord Coalition.

Indeed, while Northern Ireland’s decency and civil society have been undermined by politicians, clergy and the two-tribe mentality of the state, our teachers have been beacons of tolerance. Our much maligned education system has managed to produce wonderful, well rounded and decent children against all the odds. And our so-called “integrated system” has been at the vanguard, often, of the two-tribe mentality when some of our best schools have focused, instead, on producing some of the best academic standards in Western Europe. State-funded grammar schools help produce the highest scores in GCSE and A Level results in the United Kingdom.

For readers that aren’t familiar with the aims of the coalition, here they are. And, for the benefit of Peter Robinson, I suggest that he encourages all state-funded schools to embrace these aims. Then we will, indeed, have one system of education.

Declaration of Aims of the Accord Coalition:

In a pluralist, multi-cultural society, the state should promote tolerance and recognition of different values and beliefs. Given the dangers of segregation and the importance of community cohesion we need schools that welcome all and are committed to non-discrimination. Schools should promote a culture of questioning, of knowledge, of respect and of exploration of values, where students develop their own identities and sense of place in the world. We believe all state-funded schools should:

1. Operate admissions policies that take no account of pupils’ – or their parents’ – religion or beliefs.

2. Operate recruitment and employment policies that do not discriminate on the grounds of religion or belief.

3. Follow an objective, fair and balanced syllabus for education about religious and non-religious beliefs – whether determined by their local authority or by any future national syllabus or curriculum for RE.

4. Be made accountable under a single inspection regime for RE, Personal, Social & Health Education (PSHE) and Citizenship.

5. Provide their pupils with inclusive, inspiring and stimulating assemblies in place of compulsory acts of worship.

And we commit to work with each other locally and nationally to turn public support for inclusive education into a campaign for reform that the government cannot ignore.

Catholic heads’ anger at Robinson (bbc.co.uk)
CCMS challenges Robinson comments (bbc.co.uk)
“Educational apartheid”: Ulster First Minister’s view of faith schools – BBC News – BBC News website (richarddawkins.net)

Brian McClinton & The Pope

Published September 15, 2010 Opinion 23 Comments
Tags: Catholic Church, Catholicism, Christianity, Northern Ireland, Pope Benedict XVI, Religion and Spirituality

Image via Wikipedia

Brian McClinton, Chairman of the Humanist Association of Northern Ireland, had an article in today’s Belfast Telegraph re. the Pope and his visit to Britain. However, the article was not published in full. The full text is below.

By Brian McClinton, Humanist Association of Northern Ireland

Much of the criticism of the papal visit to Britain has focused on the pope’s alleged involvement in cover-ups of widespread sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. Certainly, these cases are scandalous and deserve all the media attention they have received. But they also serve to cast a light on the more general failings of an organisation to which the majority of the world’s Christian belong.

I would like to address these failings, without personalisation and accepting that there are millions of good Catholics, and argue that they are endemic to the Catholic Church per se and not just about the failings of Joseph Ratzinger, bad though they obviously are. So, here is a charge sheet.

In the first place, it is a highly institutionalised church, with a rigid hierarchy, set doctrines and habitual rituals. And as such it provides the classic case of what happens to a system of beliefs once they become structured and powerful. The institution loses sight of the basic message which it was established to promote and instead becomes preoccupied with its own preservation at all costs. Instead of the Church serving the people, it is the people who become servants of the Church.

Two illustrations serve to demonstrate this fundamental weakness. The first is central to its supposed raison d’etre. The Jesus of the Gospels lived a simple life of poverty and powerlessness. The Pope, by contrast, lives in imperial panoply in a 72-room palace, is attended hand and foot, has declared himself a head of state and demands the attention of political leaders throughout the world. He is manifestly more akin to a roman emperor than to the ‘Vicar of Christ’.

Again, in the child abuse scandals, the Church clearly placed its own reputation above that of the children it was meant to nourish and protect. It was prepared to indulge in massive and widespread cover-up of the abuse and even allow it to continue in order to protect itself from any hint of criticism. A religion which places great emphasis on safeguarding ‘little children’ betrayed them in its own interest.

A second failing is that it is still essentially a medieval autocracy persisting into a democratic age. It is a pyramidal hierarchy in which the Pope is not only held to be infallible when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals, but also, as with any autocracy, his opinion on almost anything tends to be taken as Gospel. He stamps his authority and his views firmly on the whole organisation. The Church itself strengthens papal power by proclaiming itself as the one, true Church of God, and treating the pope as his representative on earth.

Let’s put it bluntly. There is nothing in the Gospels which remotely justifies such a totalitarian religion as the Catholic Church. Hitler recognised its real power: “So far there has been nothing more imposing on earth than the hierarchical organisation of the Catholic Church. A good part of that organisation I have transported directly to my own party”. Hitler recognised its strength and used it for his own purposes.

A further weakness is that it is patriarchal. It is completely dominated by middle-aged and elderly males exercising authority over the young as well as women. It prohibits contraceptives, the marriage of priests and the ordination of women. For centuries the church justified the exclusion of women from the priesthood on the grounds that they were inferior to men. Even though this view can no longer be sustained in the modern world, the Catholic Church clearly continues on the assumption that it is true.

The Catholic Church is also bigoted. It insists that ‘outside the Church, there is no salvation’. Under the present pope it has shown intolerance towards atheism, Protestantism and Islam. Benedict has declared atheism to be the cause of the ‘greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice’ in history, thus ignoring the Church’s own part in the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the persecutions of heretics, the censorship of art and literature, as well as the more recent clerical sex scandals.

He has also declared that Protestant and other Christian denominations are not true churches but merely ecclesial communities without the ‘means of salvation’, and implied that Islam is unreasonable because it deems as acceptable spreading the faith through violence.

The Catholic Church itself can be accused of being irrational because it thrives on superstition and mumbo-jumbo. Apart from blind obedience to popes and priests, it fosters fear, ignorance and superstition. In a supposedly humane era it still preaches the horrors of hell, the pains of purgatory and the loss of the beatific vision in limbo. In a supposedly rational world it is still infused with a bric-a-brac of relics and rosary beads, medals and shrines, wine and wafers, incantations and exorcisms, saints and statues, miracles and holy water. All of these rituals and superstitions can be seen as part of a deliberate fostering of credulity and an attack on rationality.

A final charge is that the Catholic Church is a reactionary faith and has been throughout its history. All the great movements of western progress, enlightenment and freedom have occurred not only outside its influence but usually also in the teeth of its vehement opposition. And its obsolete and loveless morality persists into the modern world. Its reactionary stance on many issues, such as abortion, homosexuality, women’s rights and attitudes to other Christian faiths, hinders the development of a genuinely pluralist and liberal democracy.

So, let’s not blame it all on Ratzinger. The criticisms extend deep into the very heart of Catholicism.

What kind of Pope is Ratzinger? (bbc.co.uk)
Welcome to Britain, Pope Benedict! (humanistlife.org.uk)
Pope travels to Britain amid indifference, outrage (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Catholic Church and Child Abuse

Published May 21, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
Tags: Catholic Church, Child Abuse, Ireland, Religion, Sean Brady

The publication of the 2,600 page report of the inquiry into Ireland’s church-run paedophile and child abuse ”reform schools” has done little to restore any confidence in the Catholic Church. The failure of the inquiry to name and shame the perpetrators of these abuses is a national disgrace. It also shows the extent of the Irish state’s culpability. Such was the internecine relationship between church and state in Ireland during the years when these institutions were run, naming and shaming may have resulted in the state itself coming under too much scrutiny.

However, the reaction from the Catholic Church itself is supine and insulting to our collective intelligence – and especially to the victims. This is an institution that repeatedly and systematically produces paedophiles. Indeed there appears to be a causal relationship between the very fibre of the institution of the Catholic Church in Ireland and its ability to produce child abusers and bullies. Therefore the response from Sean Brady, the Cardinal of Ireland, rings very hollow. He talked about restoring trust in the Church. But let’s look at the facts. This is an institution that cannot demand a restoration of trust – because when it had that trust it systematically abused it. Not just a little:

A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from. Commission Report.

The Catholic Church should not be asking for trust to be restored. Rather it should be conducting a root and branch review of what it stands for and the people it attracts into service. Its insistence on priesthood celibacy, its creation of sex-starved orders, and its insistence that it knows all the answers to moral questions runs counter to common sense and logic. Because it patently provides the wrong answers, the wrong people and the wrong structures to provide any degree of care or love to children. It is an institution that is so flawed it deserves no trust whatsoever.

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